CJ Chueca
Cecilia Jurado Chueca was born in Lima, Perú and has been a nomadic being her whole life. Her maternal grandfather was an orphan who traveled in a warship and eventually found a putative father in Valparaiso, Chile. Her father migrated to Perú’s capital city, Lima from a small town called Muquiyauyo-Jauja, located in the high mountains of the Andes. She moved to New York in 2003 after several homes in Lima, Mexico City, and Oaxaca. Chueca’s history is the history of perpetual migration, leading her to explore the concepts of home, territory, transition, multiculturality, uprooting and solitude. In some ways she focuses on those lives that are still “on the road” (or without a route) in the streets of the world. Eleanor Heartney writes in her essay: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Chueca creates walls that neither contain nor separate. Instead, they provide insight into the complex ways that walls operate in our lives. In addition to ceramic walls, she has been working on other ceramic objects that depict transition as an ongoing series of airplane windows titled “We are Night and Day.”
On a parallel path, Chueca is mesmerized by the power of water and its never ending ride, its ability to pass through the smallest gaps, its condition as an eternal traveler. We are water, as we are rivers that will eventually mix with other rivers in the deepest water of the ocean.
C.J. Chueca was born in Lima, Perú and moved to New York in 2003. She is currently an artist in residence at the Sugar Hill Museum where she will have a solo show opening in June 2023. In 2022, she had a two-person exhibition at Kates-Ferri Projects, NY called “What lies beneath”, she was also in the group exhibition “El sonido de las voces que se hunden” at Centro Cultural de España, Tegucigalpa curated by Blanca de la Torre. Recent solo shows include “Micaela, La sangre de todas¨ at Vigil Gonzales, Cusco (2021); “The Force of Water” at Core Club, NYC with Latchkey Gallery (2020); “Somos La Noche y El Día” at Vigil Gonzales, Lima (2019); “I am the river behind the wall” at Mulherin Gallery, Toronto (2018); and “Two Blue Skies” at ICPNA Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (2018), with a monograph published in collaboration with Meier Ramirez and VM& Studio. Lately, she participated in “A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection” curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Eva Thornton at Taubman Museum; “Hay algo incomestible en la garganta” curated by Miguel A. Lopez at ICPNA-Lima. ¨Landmark¨ at El Kilometro, San Juan de Puerto Rico; Art Souterrain, Montreal curated by Dulce Pinzon with a public commissioned installation at Palais des Congress; “Crónicas Migrantes” curated by Fabiola Arroyo at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima. She was the July 2021 art resident of Silo6776 with Kates-Ferri Projects in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Upcoming projects include a public commission in the Bronx managed by Percent for Art, from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
